Clicking a html button from console application

Question

I am building a console application where I fetch html of a page and parse it using HtmlAgilityPack. After modifying some values of form present on this page I want to submit it by clicking the submit button on the same page. I am able to fetch the button using it's ID attribute but not able to click it programatically. So how should I go about this? Basically I want to submit the form after filling the details so is there any way I can achieve this through my console application.

Answer 1

You can't post an HTML document from a Console Application. fetching the document means that you parsed the HTML text but you are not linked with the Web Server on which the page is running, which would be listening to your postback.

Your only way would be to run a WebBrowser on your console application, navigate to your page and once your navigation happens, retrieve the document text, parse it as you like and then, via the webbrowser, invoke the Click method on your button.

Here is a little sample:

class Program
{
    private static WebBrowser wb1 = new WebBrowser();

    [STAThread]
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        runBrowserThread(new Uri("http://www.google.it"));
    }

    private static void runBrowserThread(Uri url)
    {
        var th = new Thread(() => {
            var br = new WebBrowser();
            br.DocumentCompleted += Br_DocumentCompleted; ;
            br.Navigate(url);
            Application.Run();
        });
        th.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
        th.Start();
    }

    private static void Br_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        //Retrieve string content of document
        var document = ((WebBrowser)sender).Document;
        var documentAsIHtmlDocument3 = (mshtml.IHTMLDocument3)document.DomDocument;
        var content = documentAsIHtmlDocument3.documentElement.innerHTML;

        //Parse content with html agility pack or whatever

        //Click on button
        wb1.Document.GetElementById("myId").InvokeMember("click");

        Application.ExitThread();
    }
}

Consider i didn't test it but should be a starting point. Also, if you have a complex page you might not want to rely on InternetExplorer (default WebBrowser) to load your page, but might consider using Firefox with GeckoFX, in which case you would have to write the HTML retrieval part in a way a bit different from the IE counterpart.

Remember to include System.Windows.Forms and Microsoft.mshtml if you want to try this sample out